Bee Informed Partnership: Complete Guide to This Free Colony Health Resource

Published August 31, 2026

Table of Contents

• What Bee Informed Partnership Is
• The Annual Colony Loss Survey
• The Tech-Transfer Team Program
• Using Loss and Management Survey Data
• How to Participate in the Survey
• BIP vs. Other Beekeeping Research Resources
• Why This Data Matters for Individual Beekeepers
• Why This Is a Genuinely Credible Source
• Who Should Actually Use BIP Resources
• A Brief History of the Program
• The Sentinel Apiary Program
• What the Data Shows Drives Losses
• Privacy and How Survey Data Is Handled
• How the Program Is Funded
• How to Cite BIP Data Correctly
• Why Regional Breakdown Matters More Than the National Number
• Encouraging Club-Wide Survey Participation
• Beyond Loss Rates: Management Practice Correlations
• Common Mistakes

What Bee Informed Partnership Is

Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) is a U.S. nonprofit research collaboration between university researchers and beekeepers, best known for running the largest annual colony loss and management survey in the country and for its Tech-Transfer Team program, which provides commercial beekeepers with data-driven colony health monitoring services. It’s one of the most established, genuinely research-grounded resources available to U.S. beekeepers free of charge, and understanding what it actually offers is worth knowing regardless of whether you ever formally participate.

The Annual Colony Loss Survey

BIP’s best-known public output is its annual national survey of winter and total-year colony losses, collecting data from thousands of beekeepers across hobbyist, sideline, and commercial operations to produce a genuinely representative national picture of colony survival trends year over year. This survey has run for well over a decade, making its accumulated dataset a valuable longitudinal record of how loss rates have shifted over time — the kind of real, citable data that individual beekeeper anecdotes or a single season’s experience can’t provide on their own.

The Tech-Transfer Team Program

Beyond the public survey, BIP’s Tech-Transfer Team program offers a paid service specifically for commercial beekeepers, sending trained technicians to sample colonies directly for mite loads, pathogen presence, and other health indicators, then providing participating beekeepers with data-driven feedback on their own operation compared to regional and national benchmarks. This is a genuinely different offering from the free public survey — a hands-on diagnostic service rather than a self-reported data collection tool.

Using Loss and Management Survey Data

BIP publishes its survey results publicly, including regional breakdowns and correlations between specific management practices and reported loss rates, giving any beekeeper — participant or not — access to genuinely useful benchmarking data. Comparing your own colony losses against your specific region’s reported average, rather than a vague national number or your own limited personal history, gives a more meaningful sense of whether your losses are within a normal range or signal a genuine problem worth investigating further.

How to Participate in the Survey

Participating in the annual loss and management survey is free and open to any U.S. beekeeper, typically involving an online questionnaire about your colony count, losses, and management practices over the preceding year, conducted during a specific survey window each year (generally in early spring, covering the preceding year). Participating both contributes to the dataset’s overall value and gives you direct comparison against the aggregate results once published, a genuine two-way benefit for a relatively modest time investment.

BIP vs. Other Beekeeping Research Resources

These resources are genuinely complementary rather than competing — BIP’s large-scale survey data captures real-world patterns across thousands of actual operations that controlled research studies, valuable for different reasons, don’t replicate at the same scale, while university and USDA extension research provides the more controlled, mechanism-focused science BIP’s survey work builds on and references.

Why This Data Matters for Individual Beekeepers

Beyond simple curiosity, understanding regional and national loss trends helps you set realistic expectations for your own operation, informs decisions about whether a particular season’s losses reflect a genuine local or personal management issue versus a broader regional trend affecting most beekeepers similarly, and gives you real, citable data to reference when discussing colony health with other beekeepers, at association meetings, or in any context where “everyone I know says” anecdote isn’t as convincing as an actual documented survey result.

Why This Is a Genuinely Credible Source

BIP’s academic-partnership structure, transparent published methodology, and long track record of consistent annual data collection make it one of the more genuinely credible sources of aggregate colony health data available to U.S. beekeepers, distinct from informal community polling or any single individual’s anecdotal experience. Citing BIP survey data specifically, rather than a vague “studies show” reference, is a meaningfully stronger way to support a claim about colony loss trends or management practice effectiveness.

Who Should Actually Use BIP Resources

Any beekeeper wanting genuine, data-grounded context for their own colony losses, anyone teaching or mentoring newer beekeepers who wants credible sources to reference (alongside pursuing a Master Beekeeper certification for a more formal credential), and commercial beekeepers specifically who might benefit from the paid Tech-Transfer diagnostic service are all reasonable users of BIP’s resources. A hobbyist with minimal interest in broader trend data beyond their own colonies may not need to actively engage with BIP resources regularly, though the free published survey results remain useful context even for occasional reference.

A Brief History of the Program

Bee Informed Partnership grew out of a collaboration among researchers at several land-grant universities in response to the sharp, unexplained colony losses beekeepers began reporting in the mid-to-late 2000s, a period that also produced the term “colony collapse disorder” in public discussion. Rather than relying solely on smaller controlled studies, the founding researchers recognized that understanding losses at a meaningful scale required actually surveying working beekeepers directly across as many operations and regions as possible, which became the founding logic behind the annual survey that remains the organization’s most visible public output today.

The Sentinel Apiary Program

Alongside the annual survey and the Tech-Transfer Team, BIP has run a Sentinel Apiary Program in some seasons, recruiting a smaller, more intensively monitored subset of colonies for repeated within-season sampling rather than a single end-of-year report, giving researchers a more granular view of how colony health indicators actually shift month to month rather than just comparing one point in spring against one point the following spring. This kind of within-season tracking helps distinguish a gradual decline from a sudden late-season event, a distinction the once-a-year survey format alone can’t capture.

What the Data Shows Drives Losses

Across years of survey results, varroa mites and associated viruses consistently show up as the most commonly cited factor beekeepers associate with their colony losses, followed by queen-related issues, weather, and starvation, though the relative ranking shifts somewhat year to year and by region. Pairing survey-level trends with your own regular mite monitoring, using a tool like the Varroa EasyCheck, gives you both the big-picture context and the specific data for your own colonies. Seeing this pattern confirmed repeatedly across a large, representative dataset — rather than relying on a single bad-luck season pushing a beekeeper toward the wrong conclusion about what actually killed their colonies — is exactly the kind of thing large-N survey data is genuinely good for.

Privacy and How Survey Data Is Handled

Individual survey responses are aggregated and reported anonymously, with published results presented as regional and national statistics rather than attributed to any identifiable individual operation, which is an important point for any beekeeper hesitant about the idea of reporting their own losses publicly. Understanding that your specific numbers disappear into an aggregate statistic, rather than becoming a searchable public record tied to your name, removes a legitimate concern that otherwise keeps some beekeepers from participating.

How the Program Is Funded

As a nonprofit research collaboration, BIP relies on a mix of USDA and university research grants, industry partnerships, and beekeeper/public donations to fund its survey infrastructure and Tech-Transfer Team operations, a funding model worth knowing about because it explains why the free public survey remains free even as the organization also offers a separately priced diagnostic service. Grant-funded research infrastructure supporting the free survey, paired with a fee-for-service model funding the more resource-intensive hands-on diagnostic work, is a fairly standard structure among agricultural research nonprofits.

How to Cite BIP Data Correctly

When referencing BIP survey results in a club newsletter, blog post, or conversation with other beekeepers, cite the specific survey year and the specific statistic rather than a vague paraphrase, since loss rates and management-practice correlations genuinely shift from year to year and citing an outdated figure as though it were current undermines the credibility citing BIP data is supposed to provide in the first place. Checking the current published results directly before citing a specific number takes only a few minutes and avoids repeating a stale figure that circulated in beekeeping discussion long after a more current survey superseded it.

Why Regional Breakdown Matters More Than the National Number

A national average loss figure blends together beekeepers facing very different climates, forage conditions, mite pressure, and management traditions, which means a regional breakdown — comparing your losses against beekeepers in a genuinely similar climate and forage context — is almost always the more actionable comparison. A beekeeper in a northern climate with a long, harsh winter and a beekeeper in a mild coastal climate face structurally different loss risk profiles, and treating the single national number as the relevant benchmark for both risks drawing the wrong conclusion about whether a given loss rate is actually a problem worth investigating.

Encouraging Club-Wide Survey Participation

Local beekeeping associations sometimes coordinate group participation in the annual survey, both to boost the raw response count from their region — improving how reliable the resulting regional breakdown actually is for members comparing their own losses against it — and to build a shared habit of contributing to the broader dataset rather than treating it as something only researchers or commercial operations bother with. A club newsletter reminder during the survey window, or a brief mention at a monthly meeting, is a low-effort way to meaningfully improve the regional data quality members later rely on themselves.

Beyond Loss Rates: Management Practice Correlations

Past the headline loss-rate figure, BIP’s survey also collects data on specific management practices — treatment timing and product choice, feeding schedules, requeening frequency, and more — and reports correlations between those practices and reported loss outcomes. These correlations don’t prove direct causation on their own, since survey respondents self-select and self-report rather than being assigned practices in a controlled trial, but seeing a practice consistently associated with lower reported losses across thousands of operations over multiple years is still meaningfully more informative than a single mentor’s anecdotal opinion or one forum thread’s worth of conflicting experiences.

Common Mistakes

Confusing BIP’s free public survey with its paid Tech-Transfer diagnostic service, expecting hands-on colony sampling from simply completing the annual questionnaire, misunderstands what each offering actually provides. Citing vague, unsourced “national loss rate” figures from memory rather than checking BIP’s actual current published results risks using outdated or simply incorrect numbers. Assuming survey data from one region automatically applies to your own significantly different climate or management context overlooks the real regional variation BIP’s own data documents.

Sources

Program structure and survey methodology reflect publicly available information from Bee Informed Partnership’s published materials and annual colony loss survey reports.